Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.

You can stream Sinead O'Connor's new album, How About I Be Me (And You Be You)? (which is a great title, btw), in its entirety on NPR. I'm not really too familiar with her work, but I enjoyed large portions of this one. Although the last track is crazy overdone and melodramatic. (Via)

io9 decides to answer the question, "How big an explosion could you realistically survive?" The answer is, not a very big one. Most of the explosions people survive in movies and on TV you wouldn't actually survive in real life. Which is disappointing, but not all that surprising. Best advice? Run as far away as you can as fast as you can.

Fëanor pours the entire internet into the Recyclotron, and only the best links come out the other end for you to enjoy.

This bullet point is for reposts from Twitter! There are a lot of rumors flying back and forth about the Alien prequel, and it's hard to determine which are true and which false. The news the other day was that the film's release had been pushed back, but now it sounds like that would only have happened if they could have gotten Leondardo DiCaprio for the movie, because they would have to have taken his schedule into account. Since they couldn't get Leo, the movie will proceed on its original schedule, with production beginning next March. However, the same report said the movie would be called Paradise, and now it sounds like that's not true. So who knows? In other movie news previously tweeted, Orlando Bloom is supposedly close to signing on to reprise his role as Legolas in The Hobbit. Now we all know Legolas was not in The Hobbit, but seeing as how he's a wood elf, and the dwarves spend some time in the wood elves' prison in Mirkwood, I can see how you could sneak him into the story. I just hope they don't make a big deal about it, and he's more of a background character. My final bit of previously tweeted news has to do with a TV show. Fringe's first episode of 2011, and the first episode aired from its new post in the Friday night "death slot," will be called "Firefly." I thought at first this was an ominous coincidence, but Blastr points out it was probably a deliberate joke/reference by the show creators.

The Wachowskis have been unable to secure funding for "their tale of forbidden love between an American and Iraqi soldier and the men's plan to assassinate President George W. Bush" (big surprise there!), but not to worry! They have another project in the wings: a modernized take on the story of Robin Hood which they're hoping might star Will Smith. Considering their love of stories about bad-ass rebels sticking it to The Man, this sounds right up their alley.

Somehow I made it through my entire college career as an English major without ever reading The Epic of Gilgamesh in its entirety. When I found poppy's copy of the 1989 edition of Maureen Gallery Kovacs' translation on the bookshelf the other day, I decided to correct this error. I was surprised to discover how fragmentary our knowledge is of the original source material. In fact, the tablets that the epic was written on are literally fragmentary, so that various sections of the story have to be recreated from other versions of the story, and other sections are just lost entirely. Even the portions that we do have can be a mystery at times; thanks to the obscurity of the ancient language and the alien cultural context of the story, the translation often devolves into guesswork, with certain phrases and terms remaining almost completely opaque (for instance, the mysterious "stone things" on the boat that Gilgamesh destroys near the end of the tale). But out of this mess a rather compelling and universal story ultimately arises, about a man named Gilgamesh who becomes best friends with his enemy, the wild man named Enkidu. Gilgamesh and Enkidu go on various adventures together, but finally Enkidu dies. (Oops, spoiler!) Gilgamesh grieves terribly at his friend's death, not the least because it has made him aware of his own mortality. He goes on a long journey seeking the secret to evading death, only to discover it doesn't exist.

Interestingly, the man Gilgamesh visits seeking the secret to immortality is essentially the prototype for Noah. He was warned by one of the Gods that a flood was coming to wipe the Earth clean of humanity, and that he should build a boat and put himself and his family aboard, along with any livestock he could find. The boat is taken up by the waters and eventually runs aground on the side of a mountain. He releases various birds to discover if there is any other land nearby. The sense I got from the introduction and notes is that a lot of the story of Gilgamesh is made up of earlier stories, and that the story of Gilgamesh was itself then retold and reused in various ways. That's storytelling for you.

I was a little disappointed that there wasn't more to the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. I'd read so much about it, and yet in the story itself, it basically just says, "then they became friends," and that's it. A lot of the story is surprisingly abrupt like that.

The opening of the poem is oddly schizophrenic. It starts by stressing how awesome and amazing Gilgamesh was, only to then move immediately into a story about how he was oppressing his own people in some vague way and that the Gods had to send Enkidu - essentially a wild, beast-like version of Gilgamesh himself - to straighten him out. It's never really clear what's so great about Gilgamesh, actually, as he spends the entire poem either failing to do things, whining about things he has to do, or succeeding in doing things that end up biting him in the ass later. But it's Gilgamesh's failures and his mortality that give the story its humanity and make it accessible (to the extent that it is).

I can't say The Epic of Gilgamesh is a fun beach read or anything, but it is interesting in the way it highlights the places where great gulfs separate us from ancient peoples, and the places where we are not even a footstep apart.

Man, I hate regular expressions. They're useful and powerful, but they're so confusing that I rarely take the time to try to figure out how to put one together that can help me. So this online tool for building them could really come in handy. (Via)

So, they're making a live-action Smurfs movie starring Neil Patrick Harris as... somebody, Jonathan Winters as Papa Smurf, Katy Perry as Smurfette, and now Quentin Tarantino as Brainy Smurf. Umm... what? This is real? This is not a joke?

Donald Richie is considered the preeminent Western scholar on Japanese film. He's written a number of books on the subject, as well as on Japan in general. This book, published in 2001, is his most recent survey of the history of Japanese cinema, and takes us from the very beginnings of the medium right up through the works of Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano (or Miike Takashi and Kitano Takeshi, as he puts it; I never know the best way to write Japanese names). Richie tries to avoid cramming the history of Japanese film into some artificial structure, like a "rise and fall" storyline, and simply tells us the major events, focusing on the most important films by the most important directors, but also speaking in general terms about various genres and influences. What's most interesting is how he's always careful to set the history of Japanese film in a general cultural context. He points out that Japanese cinema - indeed, Japanese art in general - is far more presentational than it is representational. He means by this that the world seen in a Japanese film is more likely to be a stylized one, separate from the "real" world, and not meant to be particularly realistic. Western films, on the other hand, are generally far more representational than presentational. Japanese film held onto traditional theater conventions far longer than Western film, even keeping live narrators called benshi well into the arrival of sound technology. Richie also sees a repeated pattern in Japanese history of artists, and art media in general, experimenting with new things, then incorporating them into the tradition, and then finally returning to older traditions.

I was struck again and again while reading this book by how different a time, place, and mindset Japanese film evolved out of as opposed to American film. All the same film vocabulary is there - the closeup, the long shot, the pan - but it's used in different ways, to mean different things. There are genres I've never heard of with their own sets of conventions I didn't know about. It made me realize how much subtle cultural and historical subtext I'm probably missing when I watch a Japanese film, and how much of that same type of subtext I'm picking up and taking for granted when I watch an American film. Of course I was aware of Japanese culture being different from American culture, but this book underlined for me how different it really is.

That being said, Japanese and Western film and culture are not entirely different, and in fact Western film and culture influenced Japanese film and culture a great deal. But it's interesting how Japanese cinema took those things in and made them its own.

Reading this book is kind of like reading a novel with about a thousand characters. Because I'm not familiar with that many Japanese filmmakers, and I was reading a lot of these peoples' names for the first time, I found it pretty hard sometimes to remember who was who, and to get a strong feeling for a specific artist's oeuvre. I was a little surprised, too, that the Japanese filmmakers I am familiar with didn't always get much coverage from Richie. Of course he mentions Kurosawa's work and his influence on Japanese film a number of times, but more recent filmmakers and genres get pretty short shrift. Miyazaki and anime get only a few quick mentions at the end, and Richie dismisses Miike almost entirely, pegging him (unfairly, in my opinion) as a director who's just churning out garbage to appeal to a young audience obsessed with violence and style over substance. There's no question that Miike puts out some garbage, but I think overall his work is a little more complex than Richie allows for.

Ultimately I found the book fascinating, informative, and thought-provoking. I'd be curious to try to track down some of these films now and see them for myself - I feel like I should give Ozu another try, for instance, although I still feel pretty sure he's not for me - and indeed in the back of the book Richie provides a list of the films that are available on DVD and home video. It's sad and kind of shocking that so much of early Japanese film has been lost, and so many of the movies Richie mentions have an "n.s." next to them, meaning "not surviving." But there's still a lot to see. Even the films I've already seen I'd be interested to see again - to try to watch them with new eyes, informed by Richie's analysis.

B-Side is a company that helps run film festivals, providing various handy online scheduling gadgets. I kind of liked some of the stuff they had to offer when I used it during the Philadelphia Film Festival. Sadly, B-Side is now no more.

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Welcome to the blog of Jim Genzano, writer, web developer, husband, father, and enjoyer of things like the internet, movies, music, games, and books. For a more detailed run-down of who I am and what goes on here, read this.